Book Image

Hands-On Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading

By : Stefan Jansen
Book Image

Hands-On Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading

By: Stefan Jansen

Overview of this book

The explosive growth of digital data has boosted the demand for expertise in trading strategies that use machine learning (ML). This book enables you to use a broad range of supervised and unsupervised algorithms to extract signals from a wide variety of data sources and create powerful investment strategies. This book shows how to access market, fundamental, and alternative data via API or web scraping and offers a framework to evaluate alternative data. You’ll practice the ML work?ow from model design, loss metric definition, and parameter tuning to performance evaluation in a time series context. You will understand ML algorithms such as Bayesian and ensemble methods and manifold learning, and will know how to train and tune these models using pandas, statsmodels, sklearn, PyMC3, xgboost, lightgbm, and catboost. This book also teaches you how to extract features from text data using spaCy, classify news and assign sentiment scores, and to use gensim to model topics and learn word embeddings from financial reports. You will also build and evaluate neural networks, including RNNs and CNNs, using Keras and PyTorch to exploit unstructured data for sophisticated strategies. Finally, you will apply transfer learning to satellite images to predict economic activity and use reinforcement learning to build agents that learn to trade in the OpenAI Gym.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)

Linear regression for inference and prediction

As the name suggests, linear regression models assume that the output is the result of a linear combination of the inputs. The model also assumes a random error that allows for each observation to deviate from the expected linear relationship. The reasons that the model does not perfectly describe the relationship between inputs and output in a deterministic way include, for example, missing variables, measurement, or data collection issues.

If we want to draw statistical conclusions about the true (but not observed) linear relationship in the population based on the regression parameters estimated from the sample, we need to add assumptions about the statistical nature of these errors. The baseline regression model makes the strong assumption that the distribution of the errors is identical across errors and that errors are independent...